Technology experts say Ryanair’s latest initiative to prevent screen-scraping on its site will make things difficult but not impossible.
The airline has put a captcha screen in place along with a statement saying it ‘helps prevent automated programs from abusing the service’.
The screen appears once date and destination has been entered on the home page preventing screen-scraping technology from accessing pricing and availability information.
Technology players have suggested a number of ways around the problem including a technical solution although some argue the best way might be to outsource the captcha element to cheaper labour markets in countries such as India.
A number of companies, including Travel Republic, declined to comment on the airline’s move while Skyscanner says it does not screen-scrape the site because of a pre-existing direct relationship with Ryanair.
Technology sources say it is unclear whether the airline is testing the initiative to disrupt business for dynamic packaging specialists or is considering it as a long-term strategy.
The airline made no comment.
Observers also believe Ryanair may be doing it to gauge how much of its business is coming from third parties but that other airlines putting similar initiatives in place have seen a decline in bookings as a result.
Despite widespread claims the move could cost the airline just under of its third of business, one observer comments that Ryanair knows exactly where its business comes from.
He adds, however, that the airline is also likely to annoy its direct customers with the captcha.
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Not very wise and my prediction is that they will at lease move it from flight selection to the booking page. Can remember that Easyjet tried the same years ago in Holland and removed it after a few days again. Actually I bed that it will dissapear within the next 5 days, once they’ve noticed that their bookings went down by 50% or so.
“…..the airline is likely to annoy its direct customers…”
And I’m sure this is a huge concern, because Ryanair has never made decisions that annoyed its customers up to this point.
I like it, time for the screen scrapers to wake up and negotiate with the airlines. Ryaniar should charge these professional shoplifters for content.
Ryanair does not negotiate this. All the screen scraping companies have meanwhile business relations with the airlines. It is Ryanair who is not willing to negotiate this. However this captcha thing is probably causing Ryanair causing more problems that it does for the screen scrapers. It’s literally spoken self destructive.
Could a company that should be adored do more to annoy it’s customers?
As a loyal customer of Ryanair, I think this practice is going to frustrate all customers and result in fewer bookings for them. I visit their site multiple times a month to check on fares and research possible future weekend trips to a number of destinations on my list. So I search various dates and destinations at once every time.
The Captcha that pops up every few searches is extremely annoying, way too intrusive, and makes it less likely that I will find and purchase tickets during every visit to their website.
I suggest they find another technical or legal way to prevent non-authorized sites from abusing their web servers and give their real customers every reason to visit Ryanair.com and buy tickets. How about requiring customers to login to an account to search fares uninhibited?
I’m really annoyed by the Ryanair captcha, between that and Ryanair’s own prepaid Mastercard debit card being the only payment method to avoid their £6 per person per flight admin fee, I’m not the big Ryanair fan I once was.
It is extremely annoying and almost certainly costing them far more than it’s worth. I wrote a blog post about it today where I’ve only used one study on impact on conversions and arrived at about 24 million euro in losses if that study is the benchmark. That’s available here: http://bit.ly/wPAuT6
I think in truth though the impact on revenues is much higher. I’ve only calculated on the actual captchas impact on conversions at that one action, nothing else
@chris – not sure it’s having any material impact at all…
Ryanair results for the quarter ending December 2011 (the end of the period when the captcha was introduced) saw the carrier increase revenues by 13%, profit after tax by 244%.
Passengers numbers were down by 2% (around 300,000 people), but that’s a lot less than many other carriers are experiencing due to the economy.
@kevin Hmm, well, I guess we’d need a breakdown of where the revenues came from. And of course an inside look at their backend Analytics which I guess we won’t be getting to see how big the abandonment rate is at captcha
If it were solely passenger numbers we could base revenues on and number of passengers was down but revenues are up as you’re saying, then they’re extracting a higher price per passenger. Dunno what the numbers are for their periphery products and other deals tho as a share of revenues. Would be interesting to compare those stats.
Still, can’t see how the captchas could not negatively impact conversions, especially where and how they’re placed, though Ryanair may be making up for it in higher prices?
You can search for flights on http://www.ryanairplus.com there’s no captcha.
Many Thanks Kris the pointer to ryanairplus has saved my sanity. As a Ryanair customer who books flights direct from local airport but likes to search multiple dates / destinations on on their site to find the best deals, their captcha was driving me up the wall. For those of us discretionary flyers I can’t see how it won’t be loosing them business. However maybe as we are also likely to be those customers who they don’t generate extra revenue from – not interested in priority boarding, lottery tickets, expensive drinks, arrange hotels and car hire elsewhere, then maybe they are actually actively trying to discourage us? Who knows